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Transcript of "60 Minutes" Show
on Controversial College Program

Contributed by Melinda Whiteway

Sunday, March 22, 1998

Profile: Sexuality 101; increasing number of colleges now offering sexuality studies covering all manner of sexual activities

SEXUALITY 101

MIKE WALLACE, co-host:

It may surprise you that before we begin this report on a growing field in academia that we have to give you a parental warning. But you should be on notice that some of what you're about to see, indeed, some of what is being taught on college campuses today, is for mature audience's only. So with that word of caution, time was and not too long ago the hot subjects on college campuses were black studies, Chicano studies, women studies. Today it's something called, by the people who teach it, queer studies; studies that explore sexual identity, sexual ambiguity, sexual fantasy and gay history. It is also known as gay, lesbian, bisexual transgender studies and today it's being taught at some of the top universities in the country. And it's not just the classes that are provoking controversy. At the State University of New York at New Paltz last fall, the Women's Studies Department organized an academic conference called Revolting Behavior: The Challenges of Women's Sexual Freedom. And to some who were there, that is just what it was: revolting.

Ms. CANDACE De RUSSY: This conference was a travesty of academic standards and a travesty of academic leadership.

(Footage of Candace De Russy with Wallace)

WALLACE: (Voiceover) Candace De Russy, a trustee of the college, was there.

Ms. De RUSSY: I am embarrassed to describe how, in fact, lurid the conference was. It featured the sale and the free distribution of pornographic materials including information on how to dispose of one's razor blades after, quote, "bloodletting sexual activities." So what we have here, in fact, is the degeneration of an academic forum into a platform for lesbian sex, for public sadomasochism, for anal sex, bisexuality and masturbation.

Dr. ROGER BOWEN: If students are interested in what these subjects are, best to study them in a safe, protective environment such as the academy.

(Footage of Roger Bowen; Bowen with Wallace)

WALLACE: (Voiceover) The college's president, Dr. Roger Bowen, has been under intense criticism for permitting the conference to take place, a conference that included the distribution of pamphlets like the one I read to him titled Safer Sex Handbook for Lesbians.

(From pamphlet) 'For safe penetration, use a slippery, lubed-up latex glove to enable...'

(Voiceover) Needless to say, we cannot read all of it.

(From pamphlet) '...to safely rock her into a frenzy.'

Dr. BOWEN: Mm.

WALLACE: Please, give me a break.

Dr. BOWEN: This--this is--this is--that...

WALLACE: The academy?

Dr. BOWEN: You can focus on that, if you wish. And it is titillating, and it is provocative, and it's even insulting, in many ways, to our moral sensibilities, and I understand that...

WALLACE: Yeah.

Dr. BOWEN: ...but we had 21 workshops, 19 of which were academic, very conventional...

WALLACE: Mm.

Dr. BOWEN: ...given by respected scholars in their field. The larger issue is about academic freedom and protecting the First Amendment within the academy.

Ms. De RUSSY: In the name of academic freedom, what we have here sometimes is, in fact, academic license, the notion that anything can be said--anything can be said and done on campuses now. No subject is taboo.

Dr. BOWEN: The same topic is being explored today at the University of Minnesota, University of Iowa, University of Virginia, Yale, Brown, NYU, some of the top-quality colleges in the country.

(Footage of Wallace on campus; title highlights of college courses; George Chauncey)

WALLACE: (Voiceover) So we went to visit some of the top colleges in the country, and found that, indeed, students are discussing in classes sexual practices and pleasures, homoeroticism in literature and history. Dartmouth, for example, offered Queer Theory, Queer Text; at Brown University, Unnatural Acts: Lesbian and Gay Literary and Cultural Studies; at Stanford, Homosexuals, Heretics, Witches and Werewolves: Deviants in Medieval Society. Professor George Chauncey, who teaches a gay history course at the University of Chicago, told me it wasn't so long ago that a class like his was virtually impossible.

Was there reluctance in academia, if you will, to get involved with this?

Professor GEORGE CHAUNCEY: Oh, definitely. The academy has been one of the last places to take up these questions.

(Footage of Chauncey)

WALLACE: (Voiceover) Questions, for example, which take a closer look at the sexuality of some of America's greatest heroes.

Prof. CHAUNCEY: Probably the best example of that is the case of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln, before he was married, did live with another man, Joshua Speed, for three and a half years, and slept with him, shared his bed for three and a half years. And their correspondence indicates that they had a very close, intimate relationship. And so, on the basis of this, some claim that Lincoln was a homosexual. Well, I don't think he can be called a homosexual. But at the same time, I don't think we can call Lincoln a heterosexual either. The point, it seems to me, is that Lincoln, and many, many other men and women who we know more about in the 19th century, were operating in a very different emotional universe than we are today.

Ms. ELIZA BYARD: The effect of homosexuality on society has become a legitimate focus of study.

(Footage of Eliza Byard)

WALLACE: (Voiceover) Eliza Byard, a PhD candidate in history at Columbia University, runs her own queer studies group on campus.

Ms. BYARD: If you want to understand certain moments in American history, you will understand those moments better if you see all the dynamics in play. For example, the fall of Joseph McCarthy, the Army-McCarthy hearings, 1954...

(Vintage footage of Joseph McCarthy)

Ms. BYARD: (Voiceover) ...a moment when this man who had terrorized American society for four years, was finally brought down.

One of the major tools at the disposal of the Army lawyers at that moment was homophobia. They could look to the relationship...

(Vintage photo of Roy Cohn and G. David Schine with McCarthy)

Ms. BYARD: (Voiceover) ...of Roy Cohn and G. David Schine and imply that these men were lovers.

WALLACE: (Voiceover) Cohn and Schine were Senator McCarthy's principal aides at the time.

Ms. BYARD: And that moment of humiliation and insinuation is one of the key moments in the downfall of Joseph McCarthy.

(Footage of Chauncey; John Younger)

WALLACE: (Voiceover) But gay history is only one aspect of these sexuality studies. At the other end of the spectrum, we found more debatable scholarship in courses like this one at Duke University.

Professor JOHN YOUNGER: A woman is defined as the human being who is penetrated by the man, who is defined as the human being who does the penetration.

(Footage of Younger with Wallace; title highlight of college course; Younger)

WALLACE: (Voiceover) Professor John Younger teaches an English seminar called Perspectives in Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Studies, as part of a new program he directs at Duke in the study of sexuality. On this particular day, he was talking about power and inequality in sexual relationships.

Prof. YOUNGER: ...talking about. In lesbian terms, I'm talking about the butch-femme combination. And in--in male homosexual terms, I'm talking about the sadomasochistic, where we are taking a kind of realization of a power in equality, and we are going to then exaggerate it and play with it so that for the S&M male relationship, they'll have leather--black leather costumes and leather chaps, and they'll have whips and chains, a little bit of pain, and so on and so forth.

Unidentified Student #1: You would just think that the power resides in the person who plays the role of the man, who does the penetrating.

Prof. YOUNGER: Let's say the top, put it that way. 'Top,' 'bottom' is the normal terms for this.

Student #1: What?

Prof. YOUNGER: Top and bottom--penetrator, penetratee.

Student #1: OK.

(Footage of Wallace in Younger's class)

WALLACE: (Voiceover) It was difficult for me to understand how this discussion belonged in a college English class.

I'm not sure, still, what changes this from a rap session about sexuality into academia.

Prof. YOUNGER: What I'm trying to do is to give some concepts with which students can then start looking at this very complicated social issue. There is no one viewpoint. I think we've all been, in a sense, a victim of one viewpoint.

(Footage of Wallace with students)

WALLACE: (Voiceover) I asked these students in that Duke class, all of whom identified themselves as straight, why they chose to take a class like this.

Unidentified Student #2: One of the reasons why I'm taking the class is because I want to learn more about the social structure of the country. And as a minority and a female, you know, I can understand the minority issues that the homosexual community has to face.

Student #1: Some of the theories that are introduced in class are sometimes off-the-wall, and I get frustrated just discussing something so absurd.

WALLACE: So absurd?

Student #1: Yes. Like, we discuss different theories as to explaining why people are gay, and I disagree with almost all of them.

WALLACE: What kind of theories do they give as to why people are gay?

Student #1: Well, there's one theory I remember in particular saying that women were more prone to be gay than men because we're around our mother and we're raised by a mother, and we kind of get this attraction toward women due to our mother's love.

Mr. ROGER KIMBALL: Here, what you have is a coterie of politically motivated people who are attempting to use the university as an ideological training ground.

(Footage of Roger Kimball)

WALLACE: (Voiceover) Roger Kimball, managing editor of the conservative journal The New Criterion, is among the most outspoken critics of this latest trend on campus.

Mr. KIMBALL: Every week, we get another report saying, 'Gee, our--our student body is--it's--they're terribly uneducated. They don't know who Winston Churchill was. They have never read a novel by Charles Dickens. Every week, you get a new report about how disastrous things are in education. And at the same time, what you have here is--is the total politicization of the curriculum at many places, elite places like...

WALLACE: Wait, wait, wait. Total...

Mr. KIMBALL: Right.

WALLACE: ...politicization?

Mr. KIMBALL: Well, let's put it this way: extreme politicization of--of the humanities.

WALLACE: Students aren't required to take these courses. They can choose or reject whatever they want to hear.

Mr. KIMBALL: That's why one has teachers. We have to give students what they need, not what they say they--they may want.

Professor MICHAEL WARNER: There are a lot of students for whom this kind of study is exactly the transforming experience that they need from education.

(Footage of Michael Warner)

WALLACE: (Voiceover) Rutgers English Professor Michael Warner is a pioneer in what he himself calls queer studies.

Prof. WARNER: Many of the things that we're studying are fundamental to the culture, like the concept of pleasure or the concept of consent. These things are--are key terms in our law, in our philosophy, in our ethics, in our self-understanding, and they are best understood by inquiring into the diversity of sexual practices and pleasures.

WALLACE: Professor Warner, I think that you'll agree that most people who are looking in at this moment will tell you that sadomasochism is deviant, doesn't belong in anyone's classroom.

Prof. WARNER: They will say that in one context. But Americans also know that people have all kinds of sexual pleasures. And as--sadomasochism is not confined to some peculiar fringe minority. It sells products, it's in music videos, Madonna has made a whole career out of it. And people know in that context that it's a perfectly ordinary thing--or not ordinary, maybe, but at least pleasant thing. And the fact that they contradict themselves in other contexts and say, 'Oh, it's deviant and it's horrible and objectionable, and no one should be allowed to talk about it in a university,' is a sign of deep contradiction, unrecognized conflict, and ill thought-through assumptions.

WALLACE: It's my understanding that much of sexuality studies is being driven by people who are themselves gay?

Prof. WARNER: Well, that's true. And it--it is a--it is a pretty commonsensical reason for it, which is that we're the people whose--whose lives are organized by the need to overcome the stigma, and by the need to find dignity in difference, and we find--we find each other through a shared world organized around sexuality. So it makes sense that we've thought a lot about it...

WALLACE: Mm-hmm.

Prof. WARNER: ...and that's finding expression now in a lot of academic work.

(Footage of conference; photos of transsexuals)

WALLACE: (Voiceover) And in academic conferences like this one last month at the University of California at Santa Cruz organized by the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Student Association. The program included panels such as Compulsory Meat Eating and the Lesbian Vegetarian Connection. There was a photography exhibit of transsexuals, women who became men, including the photographer himself.

Unidentified Man: And I've met so many transsexuals through this process of photographing them, and it's just been an incredibly rich experience.

(Footage of workshop)

WALLACE: (Voiceover) And we sat in on a workshop called Latex Lovers: A Workshop on Queer Women, Safe Sex.

Mr. KIMBALL: This sort of thing has no place in the university. After all, students have four years, four unrepeatable years, in which they can immerse themselves in, as Matthew Arnold put it, 'The best that has been taught and said.' Is this--is this a good use of taxpayer dollars, a good use of parents' dollars?

Prof. WARNER: We're not just saying, 'Give us some space, tolerate us.' We're saying, 'You don't really understand how impossibly conflicted this culture is on the subject of sexuality.' So we really, I think, are putting the ball back in the court of straight culture...

WALLACE: Mm-hmm.

Prof. WARNER: ...so to speak...

WALLACE: Exactly.

Prof. WARNER: ...and that's what makes people nervous. That's why we get so much flak.



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